Doomsday prepping – Disaster planning for less crazy folk (2016)
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Reposts are fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but this one was pretty clearly a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25059984, and we probably don't need two of these on the front page.
There are many, many realistic situatiations, where you might end up without power, outside, or even locked at home (like going abroad when the neighbouring country is in a "green" covid state, and your government changing their mind overnight, how they decide 'colors', and classifing it as "red", and you need to quarantene for 14 days). Plus all the "i have the flu, I don't want to go to the supermarket today" situations.
Having some supplies at home (canned food, pasta, etc.) and some extra other stuff, a barbecue or something to cook stuff in, and an extra pair of socks & a shirt in your car is a very smart thing to do. Our grandmothers, living in villages had full cellars of food not that long ago, with sacks of flour, salt, and knowledge how to bake bread, and it was a totally normal thing to do and have (and people outside of big cities still do that).
And reality TV? Show a nutter, thinking about rapture, with a cellar full of some dry freezed crap, some 5 year food supply pack on a couple of pallets, still unopened, with an expiration date two years in the future, a huge amount of guns and ammo, and a "tactical" toilet bag, with a tacital, camo colored emergency toilet paper cutter, ...just in case.
This makes preppers look stupid, their prep cases look unrealistic, people having half a slice of toast and a jar of mouldy mustard as only food items in their house and people literally starving when their delivery driver cancells their order due to icy roads.
On the other hand, with prepping, (just to point at a weird, funny case), a huge amount of people were without toilet paper this spring, both due to media panic and not having an extra pack in the basement, for "just in case" scenarios (for me it was my gf using it all, and me being too lazy to go to store that day, so I have two packs (20 rolls) just for that...).
Because people here (in slovenia) watch international news, they bought all the toilet paper here too, and it was hard to get it for like three days (luckily, slovenia is small, and distributon is not hard).
And toilet paper is easily replaced by a bidet or a shower... food isn't.
Media panic made people buy 5, 10 packs (full carts), because they saw americans and australians do it, and other be left without, so they hoarded the stuff.
But I agree with you. I always make sure we have some emergency food, water, basic power needs, heat and communication options.
I was in the middle of a lengthy move in March/April. Ended up at my new destination at the height of the panic buying/supply chain disruptions with nothing in my pantry and a single roll of paper towel. Literally as unprepared as possible.
Needless to say, I managed to stay alive... I completely stocked a new pantry with no problems, except flour and yeast, which was easy enough to find after a week or two of calling around. I did use paper towel as toilet paper for a whole week. Completely. Disastrous, let me tell you :) I did have masks that I use for wood working, so that was nice, but cutting up a shirt wouldn't have been the end of the world. And I did buy the very last thing of hand sanitizer at the store, so that was lucky, but in a pinch my 2 bottles of cheap tequila would've done the trick.
Tbh if I had spent years prepping for a pandemic I'd be pretty disappointed with how this one went down... afaict zero prepping was necessary.
> Tbh if I had spent years prepping for a pandemic I'd be pretty disappointed with how this one went down... afaict zero prepping was necessary.
I mean, come on. You and I have both ridden this out with little to no disruption to our lives, but hundreds of thousands are dead, and many more are out of work, unable to afford food, close to being evicted. "I'm fine so I guess it was never a big deal" is not an appropriate attitude.
Because preparation meant being able to actually stay at home during the stay-at-home orders, not "stay at home except for the grocery store and the pharmacy and the gas station and the warehouse club and the pizza joint", which largely moots the point.
You survived, which is great, but whatever you were doing to stock your pantry was riskier than sitting at home eating from an already-stocked pantry. It's a game of numbers and odds, and some of those same folks you were shopping alongside were sick, and did get others sick, and did contribute to the first surge in cases that swamped the hospitals.
Being prepared meant being able to completely sit out every one of those dice-throws. The more people who are prepared, the better the odds for everyone, not just the prepared.
The nutters are real - I have one in my family. At some level, this is just arguing about fringe enthusiasts lacking professional PR agents.
Well, this aged well! I'm glad to see this very reasonable take so far.
One thing that I don't see mentioned is a "go-bag" or "bug out bag", which I find to be one of the more useful preparations. Have a bag with some clothes, your documents, medication, whatever you might need if you need to leave your house in a couple of minutes notice for a couple of days. Super useful even if it's not a total life and death emergency, but you need to see or help someone, and won't know for how long. A lot of good advice here about what to put in it though! And a lot of useful advice on good skills to have.
One other small note: always have a roll of paper towels and toilet paper in your trunk in a bag. Just trust me on this one, you'll thank me later.
The article is from 2018... we got a glimpse with SARS/MERS and had sheer luck that these two didn't turn into 'rona-scale pandemic.
I also have a portable water filter; it wont get everything but since I live in Florida most likely there will be fresh water nearby.
Source - boyscout, millitary time
Note: Not affiliated, just really like their stuff
I do have some lifestraws, but never had to use them.
Assuming you have access to transparent PET bottles and sunlight water filtration is basically solved.
I only found out recently about mormon prepper culture.
I am curious what construction workers used in lieu of them. Cloth masks isn’t going to give you the protection of harmful dust from finishing a countertop or doing wood work.
What, ultimately, were preppers better prepared for?
Anyone could make a cotton mask out of a t-shirt. The mask policy was a governance error. Having N95 masks as preppers did is as far off the mark from "cotton mask" as not wearing a mask at all, preppers would still run out of N95s, they'd still use a cotton mask, N95s were still overkill.
Besides masks, was there anything the public really needed that it could not get but could have stored inside their basement? Toilet paper? That's what you will summon as, "Preppers averted a life crisis."
How are you going to doomsday prep "elective surgeries" and "ICU beds?" That's what there were real shortages of. It's ridiculous.
We were better prepared for the toilet paper Apocalypse with a bidet.
No, it's not (overkill and inadequate are not equivalent).
> preppers would still run out of N95s
Worst case, preppers with N95s would have a window with more time to source/make masks taking pressure off and giving more bandwidth to deal with other concerns, of which there were plenty as the pandemic took hold.
> Besides masks, was there anything the public really needed that it could not get but could have stored inside their basement? Toilet paper?
Toilet paper, basic but nonperishable foodstuffs (there were shortages of all kinds of staples early on), and a number of other things (even things that were technically available were often not practically available or much more time intensive to acquire on short notice because of limited occupancy for stores and delays in online shipping.)
I find that surprising. Perhaps this is the difference between growing up in a middle-class household vs. a working-class household, but personally I have seen first hand why debt is bad and been taught to avoid credit cards and debt like the plague.
Perhaps this does not fit the middle-class lifestyle and now that I am personally earning far more than my parents ever did I wonder if I should be less averse to debt, can anyone chime in with what the right balance is here?
Also, some debt is politically more favorable than others. Debt to purchase land is more easily bailed out and less risky than buying options on margin.
It’s also easier if you have supportive friends/family/spouse with high income so that you can at least have the basics in the worst case scenario.
That really depends on the economic environment.
If your goal is to get rich, you need to be comfortable with doing what it takes depending on the economic environment.
I don’t really know anyone who got rich (as in you don’t have to worry about working) with their labor. It’s buying something with 10% down that appreciates 2-3x+ and then taking those gains and investing it in something else that appreciates and so on and so forth that got the people I know rich.
For real estate in the US, you also get to take advantage of the 1031 tax exchange and basically build your wealth tax free.
Or alternatively make something that doesn't have much competition. Here in Germany family business and artisanal work is still relatively widespread, and those businesses which have built particular expertise are very hard to outcompete, and many did so without significant debt, or sometimes debt at all. It just took them 30 years. They're private, often family owned, and don't have to answer to anyone, and they're not substantially threatened by globalisation (in fact they benefit from it) or competition because there is so much operational knowledge inside the company you just can't copy it.
Apart from that, I’d avoid any other form of debt (unless it’s some weird game system like the US credit scores or cards, in which case play it if you want but be careful, if you ever trip up they’ll take you to the cleaners)
And they are all 2x+ their annual earnings deep into a mortgage.
Tolerate, maybe, but I avoid going into debt to acquire depreciating assets. Even if the loan interest rate is zero, the rate of depreciation needs to be accounted for, even though I don't get a tax deduction for the depreciation of my personal car.
Right now money is "cheap", whether it's a mortgage, or another type of loan interest rates are about as close to 0 as they can get.
There's a reason that wealthy don't call it "debt", they call it "leverage" because it can be a very useful means to an end.
Mortgage is hard to avoid if you want to buy a house.
Some responsible use of car loans have their place.
Avoiding debt is good advice for 90% of the population who can't plan or understand long term commitments relative to their income level. When you understand and internalize that debt is simply a trade of cash flows (you get money now, they get money over time) that can be beneficial to all parties involved, you treat debt as a tool. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's bad, depends on your situation. When your debt starts to accumulate, it means that your prediction of future cash flow was wrong.
If you want to own and grow a business that requires capital outlay or hiring people, there's practically no way to get started without taking on some debt. But if you're just working a W-2 job, have stable income, and live within your means, then the only "reasonable" debt to have is a mortgage and _maybe_ a car payment.
Plenty of people use debt wrong and that's why it gets a bad rep. Poor communities are often not taught proper financial management and may use credit card balances and payday loans because they believe that's what necessary to survive. Even though in the end, they are handing over a sizeable chunk of their modest income for no good reason.
Middle-class people wind up in bankruptcy because they use debt to fund luxury purchases that they didn't need and arguably couldn't afford. (Cars, boats, McMansions, etc).
Personally, I'm with you: the people who taught me to manage my finances had lived through periods where inflation and annual loan interest rates were 15%-20% - their attitude was that getting a loan to buy a car was a fool's game, and a sure sign you were living beyond your means.
At 15% annual interest I'm sure they were right - but after a decade of near-zero interest rates, I can understand why people these days are a lot less worried about buying a car on finance.
In some ways not using these low interest loans is sub-optimal. I got a 0% financing offer on my last car and left my money in the market to grow.
I think this person just has a philosophy of debt and justifies it as "prepping" even though it's not prepping related at all.
Consider a program like this to free yourself of debt: https://www.daveramsey.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps
In an emergency situation it could be life saving if you can open a door to gain access to something valuable.
You're right - locks are generally meant to keep out less committed thieves, but lock-picking is hard for the average person. It takes a lot of practice, good light, and a steady hand.
Picking a lock in an emergency situation seems impractical when you can just wrench the mechanism open.
Learning the basics is not hard and I'm sure you can imagine a situation when making a lot of noise or mess is not the best option.
All in all, you're probably better off with iodine tablets or some sort of filter.
Have been following Michal's exploits (card carrying dad here, sorry) for almost my entire infosec career. Always appreciate his practical and rational take on things. This is no exception, great article and something I think allows people to think about the topic without getting sucked into the editorializing that typically goes with it.
How gleefully some sprung into action with their N95 masks and crank-powered radios when the pandemic struck! Unfortunately their foresight did not extend to the more pressing existential issues in the building, such as mould, fire safety, security, insurance etc.
We have a pretty long history of plague, famine, war, and other "apocalyptic" scenarios, and in almost all accounts, people tend to help each other, and most would die of hunger rather than steal from an innocent person.
The main problem is that what we are very good at is building narratives that portray some class of "others" as not-so-innocent, and therefore, deserving all the pillage, rape, and murder we can muster. That's variously the neighboring nation, some minority ethnic group, political opponents, the rich, the clergy... you name them, there's some brutal revolution or war targeting 'em.
So, basically, the worst-case scenario is ending up on the wrong side of the pitchfork if / when the revolution comes. Something that, quite frankly, the Silicon Valley should be mindful of.
The classic advice goes something like this - in a survival situation you will be killed by the first critical problem you can't solve yourself. Communities form for a reason and knowing the geography of your operational area includes the social geography.
1. Some people have trust issues, possibly to a clinical level. They don't trust their neighbors to not be zombies etc knocking at the door to take their stuff. Ironically, when you spread awareness of preparatory issues through community building, you reduce the chance of that happening.
2. Some people are overly focused on one or two particular scenarios and 'optimize' their and preparations on those scenarios. E.g. A real-life neighbor has CBRN gear, firearms, and food but doesn't have a chainsaw or basic hand tools.
Like most stereotypes, the lone preppper has some truth associated with it. It really comes down to definitions. I'm not prepared for TEOTWAWKI by any means, but if I lose my job, or we get hit with a hurricane, or my car dies, or my house burns down, I've got reasonable contingency plans for those. Am I a prepper?
Dogs can help. There is a trade-off to be had. Larger dogs can actively participate in defense, but they require lots of food. Geese might be a better option; they seem to be happy eating grass.
Don't be an easy target.
Gun guys aren't liked here but if somebody is going to get a nasty surprise it would be the bad guys.
If you are a hard target bandits will most likely choose another one.
If 10 people really really want your food and supplies, they will burn you out or crash a vehicle into your home, or drop a tree on it. Alone you are nothing, you are much more in a community.
Think minute men vs a lone wolf. It is no contest.
See https://www.monolithic.org/ for the right way to build. Crashing a vehicle does nothing. One of those homes, at the bottom of a hill, withstood a run-away 18-wheeler with only cosmetic damage. Fire could damage a layer of insulation, but only if the dome isn't covered in stucco or better. Get the impact-resistant windows plus shutters, and get the tornado-resistant door.
Don't get me wrong though, since guns are extremely useful for defense and most of the bad guys aren't very tough. Surviving without a community in a serious scenario is just impossible.
It's not often. Having ten firearms and a million bullets doesn't help you much if you're a semi-crazed loner who vastly overestimates your abilities and usefullness
That's why meatspace social networking is part of prepping for some people: they recognize that, if there is a collapse, the way to survive isn't just to have stuff for yourself, its to have a well-prepared tribe. To be (well, hopefully kinder and gentler than the title sounds, for most preppers who take this strategy) the Blood King, rather than worry about him.
However, I think the reason they thought I was nuts wasn't because I was doing anything that was nuts; having extra food;clothing;water;medicine, a "bug out" bag, and some firearms isn't really extreme in any way.
The problem with prepping is the term "prepping" itself, especially its association with "doomsday prepping", which is mostly an invention of the sensationalist media. Sure, such preppers do exist, but they are an extreme minority. The media focuses on them because they are the most entertaining. Practical preparedness is boring, at least in the TV sense. The average prepper is more concerned with weather events(inc. fires, earthquakes), civil unrest, pandemics, etc. Don't get me wrong, I've met some preppers IRL that are kind of delusional, but even they aren't "doomsday" preppers. I don't think I've ever knowingly met a "doomsday" prepper.
Unfortunately, I do think that the media's mockery of prepping did nothing to encourage people to prepare in a practical way, and if anything it discouraged people who have a distaste for things they believe are right-wing.
In my opinion, prepping needs to be rebranded. We should probably drop the term "prepping" all together and just call it something like "civil preparedness". A little promotion from FEMA would help, too, especially if done under Biden, since FEMA has pretty much abandoned any meaningful public communication about preparing people for emergencies. FEMA, and formerly the US DoD as well as Office of Civil Defense, used to publish more literature on emergency preparedness and response, but you'll notice that after the late 1980s those efforts significantly declined.
In any case, the title of the article implies that lots of preppers are "crazy folk" and provides what seems like an alternative that is not crazy. The reality is that this article describes exactly what at least 95% of preppers do. Well, besides the zombie apocalypse part.
We'd have to get over that mental hill, before folks can come out on the other side and start sensibly preparing.
I've thought a civil preparedness plan could be building-by-building for instance. Multi-family dwellings could have a set of shared resources. Makes it more palatable, when 'everyone is doing it'.
We started back when we lived in the Midwest. We had a basic "tornado kit" in the basement (our first year, there were a bunch of tornadoes within 5 miles of our home) and then later, a blizzard knocked out power. Of course, the power company does the big city first, then works their way out to the country. Took us 3 days to get power back. We had propane, but the furnace needs electricity to start up the fan. The Well needs power to run the pump, etc. I was very eye opening to us.
https://mormonbeliefs.org/2016/05/02/mormons-doomsday-preppe...
https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/56kmto/doomsday_prepp...
Doomsday prepping as a phrase is an oxymoron. If there is a Doomsday, whatever that is, toilet paper is going to be the least of your concerns, almost by definition. Maybe Darnsday prepping. Or just simple due diligence, or keeping a well-stocked pantry as your ancestors did for centuries.
I don't mind having a wind up radio/usb-battery/torch in my cupboard. Or even some jugs of water, water cleansing tablets, first aid and stuff like that. Costs barely anything to be a little bit prepared.
In Scouts we teach about a bug-out bag (for being self-sufficient in a civil event like a flood or fire). Then there's home preparedness with canned food and first aid.
If you're interested in a more model-driven and systemic approach, try this, which is a pattern language for human risk management.
http://resiliencemaps.org/files/Dealing_in_Security.July2010...
For example:
- 3.3. Learn new skills --> supposedly this is to counteract the risk of your job market shifting ("develop useful and marketable secondary skills"), but the example list is pretty random and not necessarily all that economically pragmatic. So it just seems more like the author believes people should have hobbies...
- 3.4.5. Don't Hurt Yourself: Just in Case, Keep your Senses Razor Sharp --> Which basically says, don't drink or do drugs because that raises the possibility that you'll get hurt? I mean, absolutely it'll be crappy if an earthquake happens while you're high & sure if you're piss drunk you might do something dumb to harm yourself but if you really wanna talk about avoiding injuries... taking recreational drugs is probably like on the bottom of the list of things to worry about for anyone who doesn't have substance abuse problems. Feels a lot more like the author just being prescriptive about lifestyle choices.
- 3.6. Get in Shape ---> The author proceeds to dedicate 4/5 of this section to how (in their opinion) someone should change their diet to lose weight. There is then 2 sentences on how "being able to walk or bike for several hours is likely good enough to deal with all practical scenarios we talked about thus far". If that was really what mattered, one could recommend an actual exercise routine and probably spend less time lecturing folks on their theoretical obesity. Physical fitness is correlated with weight, but they're often unrelated. After all, plenty of regular (non-obese) people can't bike for hours at a time (myself included! I have terrible hip problems from a desk job, even though I can do plenty of pullups & work out regularly). If you want to be able to run long distances, you have to run. Same for biking. To focus on weight seems disingenuous.
...and so on and so forth.
I do wish that the author wouldn't couch their personal opinions on how others should live under the guise of disaster planning. But the rest of the article is fantastic & very well thought out.
(EDIT: formatting)
How lucky is this, I wonder? I suspect it's not evenly distributed, though.
In some cases, the "accidents waiting to happen" were egregious enough that the policy didn't pay anything. Accident policies always have a list of provisos that boil down to "Were you doing something egregiously stupidly dangerous for funsies when you got injured? We aren't cutting you a check!"
It was only a really tiny percentage of claims that were clearly and obviously "Damn. Wrong place, wrong time. It sucks to be you, dude." In five years, there were only about three claims that made it hard for me to sleep nights, even though I routinely read police reports and ER reports describing quite serious injuries (plus lots of really minor injuries -- see above about getting regular visits covered as "accidents").
I tend to not like articles of this sort. I don't like reading, for example, about millionaires and billionaires who have bunkers in New Zealand and a jet waiting "just in case" things go to hell over night.
All that does is it tells me the rich people running the world aren't doing enough to run the world well. They foolishly imagine that after they run the world into the ground they can handily escape the consequences of their actions and only the little people will really suffer because of it.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895. The crux of the plot is that "in the dystopian future, the descendants of hard working servants will be eating the sheeple descendants of the helpless rich." (a message that tends to get lost in movie versions of the story).
That's a much more likely scenario if things truly go to hell. The rich people whose wealth and comforts depend upon stocks and bonds and working financial markets and the like will not likely come out on top.
It will be soldiers and hunters and people with real survival skills pertinent to the dystopian scenario who will suddenly be the people with power and social backing. Rich people skills only work to keep you on top if you keep your civilized world humming along nicely and don't let it go to hell in a hand basket.
Kind of like the scene in The Titanic where the rich guy tries to bribe his way onto a lifeboat and gets told "Your money isn't worth anything to me at the bottom of the sea." The guy he was trying to bribe was going to go down with the ship. He had no further use for money. He would be dead within a few short hours, tops, and he knew it.
I know why these articles appeal to people, but I wish they had less appeal. I wish actually resolving our problems was a more popular topic, but any time I try to talk about real solutions I'm given a ration of crap.
No one wants to hear that we should be doing x, y and z practical, unexciting thing today. It isn't any fun to talk about that. Most people just want to imagine some fantasy in which things get really and truly crazy bad -- as if they aren't bad enough currently -- but bad in a way where heroics somehow save the day rather than, say, washing your hands and not rudely blowing your nose next to people under your mask while standing in a crowded Walmart.
Articles like this are mostly escapist fantasy where people imagine themselves the hero in some future that plays out like an exciting movie. It helps them forget the dull reality of our current serious problems for a bit while not requiring them to actually fix anything in earnest.